Hydrosocial hinterlands: An urban political ecology of Southern California’s hydrosocial territory

Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.

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Urban political ecology III

Progress in Human Geography ◽

10.1177/0309132517693336 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 42 (3) ◽

pp. 446-452 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Nik Heynen

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Urban Geography ◽

Second Generation ◽

Urban Political Ecology ◽

Feminist Political Ecology ◽

The Cross ◽

The City ◽

Queer Ecology

Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.

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Pipes and praxis: a methodological contribution to the urban political ecology of water

Journal of Political Ecology ◽

10.2458/v22i1.21115 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 389 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Lucero Radonic ◽

Sarah Kelly-Richards

Keyword(s):

Social Justice ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Case Studies ◽

Water Governance ◽

Resource Scarcity ◽

Applied Anthropology ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Capital City ◽

Urban Political Ecology ◽

Water And Sanitation

This article contributes to the urban political ecology of water through applied anthropological research methods and praxis. Drawing on two case studies in urban Sonora, Mexico, we contribute to critical studies of infrastructure by focusing on large infrastructural systems and decentralized alternatives to water and sanitation provisioning. We reflect on engaging with residents living on the marginal hillsides of two rapidly urbanizing desert cities using ethnographic methods. In the capital city of Hermosillo, Radonic emphasizes how collaborative reflection with barrio residents led her to reframe her analytical approach to water governance by recognizing informal water infrastructure as a statement of human resilience in the face of social inequality, resource scarcity, and material disrepair. In the border city of Nogales, Kelly-Richards reflects on the outcomes of conducting community-based participatory research with technical students and residents of an informally settled colonia around the construction of a composting toilet, while also investigating municipal government service provision efforts. Our article invites readers to view these infrastructure alternatives as ways to explore how applied anthropology can advance the emancipatory potential of urban political ecology through a collaborative investigation of uneven urbanization and basic service provisioning. We emphasize everyday situated relationships with infrastructure in informally organized neighborhoods. Using praxis to collectively investigate the complex and entangled relations between large piped water and sanitation projects and locally developed alternatives in under serviced areas, the two case studies reveal lessons learned and illuminate grounded research openings for social justice and environmental sustainability.Key words: Applied anthropology, infrastructure, political ecology, praxis, water governance, social justice

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Producing an urban hazardscape beyond the city

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space ◽

10.1177/0308518x17718373 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 49 (9) ◽

pp. 1968-1985 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Kristian Saguin

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Flood Control ◽

The Philippines ◽

Urban Political Ecology ◽

Mediating Role ◽

Metro Manila ◽

Spatio Temporal ◽

Urban Risk ◽

The City ◽

Laguna Lake

Urban socioecological risk, like other urban metabolic processes, embodies relations between the city and the non-city. In this paper, I trace the production of urban risk within and beyond the city through the lens of the hazardscape using the case of Metro Manila and Laguna Lake in the Philippines. Building on recent interventions in urban political ecology that seek to map the terrains of extending urban frontiers, I examine the processes that construct city and non-city spaces in urbanization through flood control. I synthesize narratives of the material-discursive production of risk mediated by infrastructure with histories of landscape and livelihood change in an urban socioecological frontier to make two related arguments. First, discursive constructions of city and non-city and the material flows that connect them shape the production of urban ecological risk, with material consequences for non-city vulnerabilities. Second, infrastructure plays an important mediating role in the production of hazardscapes. The intersection of flows of water, discursive urban imaginaries in state plans, and livelihoods in Metro Manila and Laguna Lake exemplifies metabolic relations that reveal the spatio-temporal connections of cities with landscapes that make their functioning possible.

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Urbanizing Islands: A Critical History of Singapore's Offshore Islands

Environment and Planning E Nature and Space ◽

10.1177/25148486211051082 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 251484862110510

Author(s):

Creighton Connolly ◽

Hamzah Muzaini

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Indigenous Communities ◽

Urban Political Ecology ◽

Critical History ◽

Urban Core ◽

History Of ◽

City State ◽

The City ◽

Environmental Inequalities ◽

Over Time

While Singapore is often considered an island city in the singular sense, the city-state actually consists of many islands, with the Singapore mainland being by far the largest. While most of these islands traditionally had thriving indigenous communities, all have since been displaced over time as the islands were developed to service Singapore's economic and metabolic needs as a rapidly urbanizing and developing nation. Some of the islands have also undergone considerable transformation (through reclamation) which has had significant impacts on the ecologies of the offshore islands. This simultaneously allowed for the ‘ruralization’ of mainland Singapore to provide more green space for nature conservation, recreation and leisure. This paper will provide a brief history of these transformations, drawing on specific examples which serve to illustrate how Singapore's offshore islands have been redeveloped over time to service the nation-state and in response to the changing needs of the urban core. In doing so, the paper examines how spaces on the urban periphery are deeply bound up with processes of ‘urbanization’, given their important role in processes of urban metabolism. In this way, the paper contributes to recent work in urban political ecology which has sought to trace processes of urbanization beyond the city and render visible the socio-environmental inequalities produced therein.

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Ecologically unequal exchange and ecological debt

Journal of Political Ecology ◽

10.2458/v23i1.20220 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 328 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Alf Hornborg ◽

Joan Martinez-Alier

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Case Studies ◽

Special Section ◽

Environmental Distribution ◽

Unequal Exchange ◽

Introductory Article ◽

Empirical Case Studies

This article introduces a Special Section on Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE), an underlying source of most of the environmental distribution conflicts in our time. The nine articles discuss theories, methodologies, and empirical case studies pertaining to ecologically unequal exchange, and address its relationship to ecological debt.Key words: Ecologically Unequal Exchange, ecological debt, political ecology This is the introductory article in Alf Hornborg and Joan Martinez-Alier (eds.) 2016. "Ecologically unequal exchange and ecological debt", Special Section of the Journal of Political Ecology 23: 328-491.

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An urban political ecology for a world of cities

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098020919086 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 57 (11) ◽

pp. 2357-2370 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Roger Keil

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Entry Point ◽

Special Issue ◽

Urban Political Ecology ◽

Rhetorical Question ◽

The City ◽

Theoretical Project

The critical considerations in this commentary have been stimulated by the articles joined together in this inspiring collection. Specifically, this commentary reflects on how one might imagine an urban political ecology for the age of planetary urbanisation. While the editors of and contributors to this special issue have done an admirable job of providing intellectual coherence to this project, there remains work to do, especially on the conceptual and theoretical front. The conveners of this symposium lay out an ambitious agenda for the papers in this issue and ultimately for the field: They ask: ‘why does everyone think cities can save the planet?’. It is part real inquiry, part rhetorical question. These questions also provide the entry point into a coherent and serious theoretical project that lies at the bottom of the assembled papers here and is elegantly laid out by the special issue editors in their introduction. This commentary takes up the challenges posed by the theoretical and empirical projects discussed in this issue and discusses them in light of past advances in thinking across the city–nature divide, technological politics and the changing spaces and times of current urbanisation.

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Race and the construction of city and nature

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space ◽

10.1177/0308518x17713995 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 49 (9) ◽

pp. 1948-1967 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Kevin Loughran

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Political Ecology ◽

19Th Century ◽

Spatial Dynamics ◽

Natural Environments ◽

Urban Political Ecology ◽

Urban Theory ◽

Critical Urban Theory ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

The City

Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the “hybridity” of urban–environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed “binary” relationship between “city” and “nature” that dominated historical understandings of urban–environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city–nature boundaries have been understudied. Many explanations position accelerating urbanization or changes in global political economy as driving the decline of the city–nature binary. This paper proposes that this transformation is also a product of the changing cultural and spatial dynamics of “race” between the 19th-century and the present. Drawing on research on urban parks in Chicago, I consider the production of park space at four important historical moments: (1) the mid-to-late 19th-century, when large picturesque parks were built; (2) the early 20th-century, when reform-oriented “small parks” were constructed; (3) the post-World War II period, which was marked by the development of recreation facilities; and (4) the contemporary period, where linear parks like Chicago’s 606 (which I term “imbricated spaces”) bring together built and natural environments in new ways. Through this analysis, I argue that the social construction of “city” and “nature,” as spatialized through urban park development, was co-produced with racialized spaces and symbols and contributed to the creation of metropolitan racial boundaries. Further, I argue that historical shifts in these racialized spaces and symbols have been implicated in the weakening of the city–nature binary and the rise of the hybrid city–nature relationship.

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